Sage 2.10 released!

Sage 2.10 is out. It wasn't planned this way since we had originally shot for some release early next week, ideally Monday. So what happened? 2.10.alpha4 build perfectly on all of our test platforms and the results from the patches created during Doc Day 1 would potentially destabilize the build. All was set in motion to release at this point - after all we had gone nearly twelve days since the last release, which is longer than the usual time between releases - but the release was held up by some tricky, long standing but extremely hard to reproduce bug in the Maxima interface of Sage triggered by some last minute merge of an essential fix. William finally tracked it down and fixed it, which delayed the release about 24 hours. I used that time to catch up on sleep and to prepare myself for Bug Day 9.

The main changes for Sage 2.10 are:

• Python is now built with ucs4
  
• FLINT was updated to the 1.0.5 release
  
• Many bug fixes and also a couple of significant memory leak fixes
  
• Integrate a fix to the MPFR library so we no longer smash the stack with high precisions. This cause a performance regression when multiplying
  
• Fix a long standing, hard to hit bug in the Maxima interface
• When launching external executables LD_LIBRARY_PATH is restored for external binaries, i.e. those which do not reside in SAGE_LOCAL/bin. Before the patch many external executables failed due to library conflicts. This was reported many times on Debian based systems

What does the future hold? Sage 2.10.1 is already getting merges on the way to alpha0. So stay tuned :)

Cheers,

Michael

Sage 2.10.alpha4, Doc Day 1 & Bug Day 9

We are making progress toward Sage 2.10. With 2.10.alpha4 we have closed 72 tickets, but we are working very hard to make this release an excellent one. There are two events coming up this week:

• Doc Day 1 will be held on Thursday the 17th, 2008, i.e. tomorrow, starting at 9am PST. We will write doctests and documentation. Since it is the first of its kind we will play it by ear and see how it goes.
• Bug Day 9 will be held on Saturday the 19th, 2008, starting at 9am PST. It will be business as usual and the plan is to put the finishing touches in the 2.10 release. From experience we will sort out the fallout from all the merges we do at the bug day on Sunday and release either Sunday or Monday night depending on how many issues and last minute problems creep up.

It does look like we will miss most of the goals we set ourselves for 2.10, but we made progress on various fronts and will just shift any issue left open to bug fix releases 2.10.x which are planned weekly until at least 2.10.3

Cheers,

Michael